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Wednesday September 11, 2013 7:16 AM

WASHINGTON (AP) — The richest 1 percent of Americans earned more than 19 percent of the country’s
household income last year — their biggest share since 1928, the year before the stock market
crash. And the top 10 percent captured a record 48.2 percent of total earnings last year.

U.S. income inequality has been growing for almost three decades. And it grew again last year,
according to an analysis of Internal Revenue Service figures dating to 1913 by economists at the
University of California, Berkeley, the Paris School of Economics and Oxford University.

One of them, Berkeley’s Emmanuel Saez, said the incomes of the richest Americans surged in part
because they cashed in stock holdings to avoid higher capital-gains taxes that took effect in
January.

In 2012, the incomes of the top 1 percent rose nearly 20 percent compared with a 1 percent
increase for the remaining 99 percent.

The richest Americans were hit hard by the financial crisis. Their incomes fell more than 36
percent in the Great Recession of 2007-09 as stock prices plummeted. Incomes for the bottom 99
percent fell just 11.6 percent, according to the analysis.

But since the recession ended in June 2009, the top 1 percent have enjoyed the benefits of
rising corporate profits and stock prices: 95 percent of the income gains reported since 2009 have
gone to the top 1 percent.

That compares with a 45 percent share for the top 1 percent in the economic expansion of the
1990s.

The top 1 percent of American households had pretax income above $394,000 last year. The top 10
percent had income exceeding $114,000.